I’ve been creating pretty little matching envelopes to send my traded ATC’s off in. To create them, I downloaded the ATC envelope template from Mirkwood Designs (a wonderful treasure trove full of printables) and opened it up in Photoshop. Since the image is in GIF format you’ll need to change the Image Mode to RGB color. I then took out the writing and dotted lines with my square selection tool by making sure my background color was set to white and just enclosing the writing in the selection box and hitting the delete key. I placed my finished ATC card over the template and resized it for the card. I then selected the envelope shape, making sure my layer was on the ATC card layer, inverted the selection and hit the delete key to remove the extra parts of the image so my ATC was now in the shape of the envelope. To get rid of the black line around the envelope, just add another layer below the ATC card layer and fill that with white. Print it out on heavy white cardstock. Now I don’t know if it was just my printer but Mirkwood’s template was too large for my cards so I just reduced the scale to 75% before printing. You may have to play around with the settings on your printer to see what works for you.

To make the actual envelope folds, I used a heavy ruler and my little Cutter Bee scorer and scored where the folds should be. I then folded over the ends and using my bone folder and an extra piece of cardstock to protect the envelope, I smoothed the folds. Following the directions on the original Mirkwood template, I glued the folds and smoothed it again using a piece of cardstock. The finished envelope is decorative and works quite nicely at protecting your ATC’s.